Hemispheric Imaginings
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notes introduction 1 See also Janice Radway’s 1998 American Studies Association presidential ad- dress, ‘‘What’s in a Name?,’’ on the move toward what she calls ‘‘Inter-American studies.’’ This problem of naming plagues all Americanists doing work on em- pire. To avoid referring to U.S. nationals as simply ‘‘Americans,’’ which is con- ventional but problematic for these reasons, scholars sometimes resort to more awkward substitutes like ‘‘U.S. citizens’’ or ‘‘people of the United States.’’ In this study, rather than invoking the political connotation of citizenship, I will refer to U.S. nationals as ‘‘USAmericans.’’ 2 Buell’s earlier essay ‘‘American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenome- non’’(1997)wascriticizedforitstoosimplisticseparationofpostcolonialcultural development from what Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease have called ‘‘the cultures of United States imperialism.’’ In her introduction to the groundbreaking an- thology of that title, Kaplan takes Buell’s essay to task for its failure to recognize that U.S. nation building and empire building were ‘‘historically coterminous and mutually deﬁning’’ (‘‘Left Alone with America,’’ 17). I read Buell’s complex conceptualization of this hemispheric project in his later work as responding to suchcriticisms;thereheclariﬁesthataculturalidentitybasedonrevolutionfrom colonialism does not preclude simultaneous participation in imperialist prac- tices. Eric Cheyﬁtz has similarly proposed what he calls an ‘‘Americas Cultural Studies’’ that ‘‘would take as its focus, in an international context, a rigorous theoretical/historicalcritiqueoftherelationshipbetweencapitalismanddemoc- racy in the hemisphere, positing this relationship as inherently contradictory, a contradiction that American exceptionalism has typically elided’’ (843–44). This model would avoid the emphasis on parallelism that weakens compara- tive studies such as that by Fitz. See discussion of similar possibilities in Paul Jay, Gregory Jay, Chevigny and Laguardia, Muthyala, Pérez-Firmat, and Rowe, ‘‘Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies.’’ 3 William ApplemanWilliams’s 1961 TheContoursofAmericanHistory gave an in- fluential revisionist critique of the Monroe Doctrine, calling it a ‘‘defensive state- ment of the territorial and administrative integrityof North and South America’’ that conceals a ‘‘positive, expansionist statement of American supremacy in the hemisphere’’ (215). See also Allman and Smith. 4 This realist/idealist divide is one major premise separating my approach from